Track the Votaws as they travel the world!

We departed Provo on Tuesday, April 8th and headed across the Caicos bank to “Six Hills Cay”. As you might imagine, there are six hills that distinguish this small island. We motored pretty much dead into the wind due to the shallow water and limited room to tack. We arrived in the afternoon and spent a great afternoon and night there. Very clear water, great snorkeling, nice and calm for a good nights sleep. On the way from Provo, we came across a fishing boat that sold us 5 lobsters for $10! What a deal! (We found out later from our friends on “Toucan” that lobster season had closed on April 1st, so that might explain the great deal.) Anyway, we dined on fresh lobster for supper that evening. Unfortunately, the kids weren’t big fans. So we allowed Travis to use some leftover pieces for bait. He proceeded to trade in about 1 oz. of lobster for about a 5 lb. grouper. Not a bad exchange I guess.

The next morning the wind was light and out of the SE (dead ahead, naturally) so we decided to sail for a while since we only had 28 miles to go to Big Sand Cay. When we finally got to the edge of the bank, we fired up the engine to get our speed up to a good trolling speed and put out a fishing line. Within about literally 60 seconds of getting it out … BAM! Trav hooked into a pretty good sized fish. We couldn’t tell what it was but it fought really hard for a while. Then it leaped out of the water and we could see that it was some sort of mackerel type fish. Shortly after it leaped it started fighting really strange and skimming on top of the water like it was dead, but then pulling quite hard again a moment later. Well, when we got it to the boat it was nothing but the head of a large wahoo with two barracudas chowing down on its remains. It had been a fairly large fish maybe 3 feet or so, probably the same size as one of the barracudas and only slightly smaller than the other. Those barracudas are really aggressive. Travis caught it and they cleaned it.

When we got to Big Sand, we swam ashore and played for a while. The boys skim boarded in the surf. The water was amazingly clear and a beautiful sapphire color.

There was a long low swell running and the sandy bottom continued about 15 feet deep all the way up to a steep sandy beach. It was neck deep about 10′ offshore. We didn’t explore much because we had on swimsuits and no shoes, but it looked like an interesting island. Several of the other boats a the anchorage saw huge humpback whales jumping and frolicking around (can a huge whale frolic?) Unfortunately, we were never in the right place at the right time to see them.

Thursday afternoon we left Big Sand for Luperon. The wind was out of the east and supposed to maybe go a little north of east. We didn’t really need that much time but the wind was predicted to go more south of east later on. So we took off at about 1pm on the 80 mile crossing, knowing we would arrive well before daylight and have to heave to till sunrise.

We sailed in company more or less with our friends and their boat “Toucan.” They have three kids also but theirs are much younger. Anyway, they got some great pictures of Cannibal underway. We got some of Toucan also and we swapped in Luperon.

Be sure and check out page two of our gallery for new albums and pics.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2008 at 7:48 pm and is filed under Cruising. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.